Read, Set, Grow! Done-For-You Personal Trainer Marketing

Ok we’re now into August, that means that September is a hop, skip and a jump away and we all know what that means. Kids back to school, parents in regular routines, time to act on those fitness goals, it’s the beginning of the peak season for the fitness industry. Today I have a gift for you, I’m going to share with you a tried, true, totally effective personal trainer marketing campaign that has been used by myself and my coaching clients in multiple markets.

This promotion uses the following proven marketing strategies, I’m going to share with you exactly what I did AND tell you blankly what I would do next time to make it even better.

• A visual direct mail advertising piece.
• An opt-in to ensure you are growing your mailing list.
• A hot button questionnaire to qualify your prospect.
• A placement fee (deposit) conditioning the prospect to feel comfortable spending money with you.
• Scarcity in volume and deadline.
• Risk reversal with a money back guarantee and the deposit being refundable, increasing the “know, like, trust” factor with the prospect.

Ok the following is a sample of the exact ad I ran in a local coupon book. We selected the coupon book because it is well known here, inexpensive and could be completed easily on short notice, next time I would use a standalone piece now that I have evaluated the results.

Though this coupon was effective it could be improved, see below for details.

Even though this coupon was effective it could be greatly improved as a stand alone piece. Because at the time it was untested we wanted to ensure we received enough value from this ad to cover it’s cost, which is why we opted for the very low barrier “Win an iPad” offer to grow our list.

Your version of the 3 week promotion should include an emotional, questioning headline, something like “Can you believe this? or Does this sound like you?”

You should then use social proof to wow the prospect with a strong before and after photo and a compelling one sentence testimonial outlining their results.

Free or not to be free, depending on the response you are looking for you may opt not to advertise it as a free program. Free generally will produce more people to the next step, but then these people are less qualified and can at times be more problematic. If you do list a price point ensure that it translates to a heck of a deal that is justified with scarcity in terms of limited availability and a deadline. In this case this ad is a poor example, as “Limited spots” is not sufficient enough, define the number, and the deadline was missed altogether. (This was my bad as I was in a rush to get this to approval and realized after i had missed the expiry date.)

Now the offer was compelling enough to lead people to check out our website, which is all the offline ad was really supposed to do. Our website (www.PersonalTrainingRedDeer.com) as you can see represents high value to the visitor, with lot’s of social proof and valuable information immediately available, this ensures that most people will stay a few minutes or return when they have time to look around. Having a big website is not the suggestion here, having rich, valuable, compelling content is.

Where the consult form now resides the following web form was positioned for the duration of the promo.

This form served as an opt-in for anyone interested in the promotion, they could not find out any further details about the program unless they entered their email or called us directly. You could argue this would turn some people away but honestly, they’ll never be your customer if you don’t get to contact them at some point in the process, so it becomes your first filter. Once they complete the form you have a number of ways to convert them. Either they:

a) continue the process and buy into the promotion.

b) Navigate away in which case you can have an autoresponder that sends itself within 24-48 hours indicating perhaps there was a website error and make them the same or slightly different offer in a effort to convert them.

c) continue to indoctrinate them with regular valuable content such as that from your newsletter eventually leading them to contact you about your services.

Once they clicked through the opt-in they were met with the real magic behind this promotion, the emotional hot button qualifier that helped them decide to move forward. You can see this final element below:

Click to view full size image.

You can see in this final step the line of questioning is to serve one purpose, to validate with the reader why they have went this far, confirm that this is the solution for what they have been thinking and direct them to buy risk and worry free.

Now depending where you are in the world you may or may not want them to purchase online, we sometimes find in our community that people still disconnect at the point of actually making an online purchase, so you may want the submission to simply be a step where they give you their phone number so you can contact them and handle it directly (this generally works better for us) but if people in your community are conditioned to buy online then you can fully automated this process making it inexpensive, easy, repeatable and easy to evaluate. It could work with direct mail, addressed mail, email marketing, or PPC such as Facebook advertising, all viable options.

As a final note, we never execute a promotion without pre-determined conversion offers to long term programs which I’ve details in my “3 Point Conversion” post. I can tell you that a high percentage of our long term conversion occurs on day one, most people know at that time they will need something longer to reach their goals, with enough value and solid risk reversal many people will make that step on the very first day, this is good for you and good for them.

Now take this strategy and apply it in your own business, I’d love to hear about your experiences and results.